Old research studying notes on Jean Luc Nancy and Derrida

They were good friends and colleagues. Derrida published a volume about Nancy, ON TOUCHING, in which he critiques Nancy for employing the term “fraternity” positively to indicate an acceptable context for human association. Nancy has responded that he has made it clear in many publications that he is sensitive to the issues that Derrida finds inescapable with the use of “fraternity.” As Ian James writes in THE NANCY DICTIONARY, “Fraternity is a relation in which the incommensurable singular plurality of being is affirmed as an infinite sharing." Somewhere in reference to that disagreement, I was directed to read this volume by Derrida on friendship.

Derrida offers a compelling argument that the word “fraternity” has always had masculine overtones in our tradition, which today amount to ridiculous denigrations of the feminine; Derrida calls it “the virility of virtue.” Alongside that he reveals, through a scholarly deconstruction of Kant's Metaphysics Of Morals, an example of the contradiction that lingers at the heart of ethics: the requirement of distance for the proper maintenance of friendship is not applied to love, even while no account is given of a distinction between the two to permit such discontinuity. Derrida asks, “Why would the infinite distance which opens respect up, and which Kant wished to limit by love, not open love up as well?” Love then becomes the problem and not the answer crooned in popular, as well as scholarly, texts.

The element of discontinuity persists even to the time of the writing of this book by Derrida, who does not presume to supply an answer. All of which echoes with great emphasis Simon Critchley's complaint in 「Infinitely Demanding」 that we have no adequate political philosophy today. In summary of this work by Derrida, one might say, “It is little wonder that it is so.” All our categories for understanding and imagining a basis for loving human relationships, or even for democracy, are tattered and torn. Derrida is left only the option of a question to end the study: “When will we be ready for an experience of freedom and equality that is capable of respectfully experiencing that friendship, which would at last be just, just beyond the law, and measured up against its measurelessness? Ohh my democratic friends..."

And, a large part of Derrida's book is devoted to commenting on Nietzsche's more contradictory statements. "Friends, no friends!" thus said the dying sage; "Enemies, no enemies!" say I, the living fool.

Here the friends become enemies, saints pretend to be fools. People don’t know whether they are happy or mourning for the disappearance of the enemy. If they follow Karl Schmidt, they will doubt politics.